Staff Software Engineer - Android, Mobile Networking

About the Team

The Uber Mobile Networking team owns the mobile networking stack and its functionality across all Uber apps. Our focus areas include latency and reliability, consumer-facing networking APIs, developer experience, and observability.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Android Mobile Networking team, you will play a critical role in defining the technical direction and evolution of Uber's Android networking infrastructure. You will tackle complex engineering challenges at scale, improving networking performance, reliability, and security for millions of users worldwide.

In this role, you will serve as a technical leader, driving architectural decisions, leading large-scale initiatives, and influencing engineering practices across multiple teams. You will partner closely with mobile, backend, and infrastructure engineers to build scalable networking solutions while mentoring and elevating the technical capabilities of engineers around you.

About the Role

What the Candidate Will Do

• Drive technical strategy and architecture: Define and lead the technical direction of Uber's Android networking stack, ensuring scalability, performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability across all Uber apps.
• Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives: Own large-scale, technically challenging projects from architecture and design through implementation and production rollout, collaborating with mobile, backend, and infrastructure teams.
• Evolve core networking infrastructure: Design, develop, and modernize foundational Android networking libraries, frameworks, and APIs used by engineering teams across Uber, improving developer productivity and platform consistency.
• Optimize networking performance at scale: Identify and solve complex networking challenges involving latency, connection management, failover, and reliability across diverse mobile network conditions.
• Advance observability and reliability: Establish and improve client-side networking telemetry, tracing, monitoring, and debugging capabilities to proactively identify performance regressions and production issues.
• Drive engineering excellence: Establish technical standards, influence architectural decisions, and lead design and code reviews to improve engineering quality across the mobile platform.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship: Guide senior engineers, mentor team members, and foster technical growth while influencing engineering decisions beyond your immediate team.
• Own production reliability: Lead investigations into complex networking incidents, drive root-cause analysis, and implement systemic improvements to prevent recurring issues. Participate in the team's on-call rotation.
• Drive data-informed improvements: Design and evaluate staged feature rollouts and A/B experiments, partnering with Data Science and cross-functional stakeholders to measure the impact of networking changes and guide technical decisions.

Basic Qualifications

1. 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience developing and shipping Android applications, libraries, or mobile infrastructure.
2. Expert proficiency in Kotlin and/or Java, with deep knowledge of the Android SDK, platform internals, and mobile application architecture.
3. Strong understanding of concurrency, multithreading, synchronization, asynchronous programming, and performance optimization.
4. Hands-on experience with Android networking libraries and frameworks such as OkHttp, Retrofit, Cronet, gRPC, or WebRTC.
5. Demonstrated experience designing and delivering complex, scalable software systems or platform infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams.
6. Proven ability to lead significant technical initiatives, make architectural decisions, and drive execution across multiple teams.
7. Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical direction and articulate complex engineering tradeoffs to diverse stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

1. Extensive experience working on mobile networking, mobile infrastructure, or platform/SDK engineering teams, ideally supporting applications at significant scale.
2. Deep expertise with OkHttp and/or Cronet, including interceptors, connection pooling, transport configuration, and networking performance optimization.
3. Strong experience with Kotlin Coroutines, asynchronous programming patterns, and Android build systems such as Bazel.
4. In-depth knowledge of networking protocols and concepts, including QUIC/HTTP3, HTTP/2, TCP/IP, UDP, DNS, TLS, connection migration, and mobile network optimization techniques.
5. Experience architecting, distributing, and maintaining reusable Android libraries, SDKs, or APIs adopted across large engineering organizations.
6. Experience designing and scaling client-side observability solutions, including network telemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, dashboards, and production debugging tools.
7. Demonstrated success profiling and optimizing mobile performance, including network I/O, latency, connection reliability, and battery consumption.
8. Track record of providing technical leadership, mentoring senior engineers, and influencing architectural decisions across teams.
9. Experience diagnosing and mitigating complex production networking outages and performance regressions using client-side telemetry and systematic root-cause analysis.
10. Experience designing, rolling out, and measuring networking changes through staged feature flags, A/B experiments, and data-driven performance analysis.
11. Experience with real-time streaming technologies such as WebRTC and integration with audio and video capabilities on Android.
12. Ability to balance long-term architectural investments with immediate business priorities, driving technical solutions that deliver measurable impact at scale.

For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $232,000 per year - USD $258,000 per year.

For Seattle, WA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $232,000 per year - USD $258,000 per year.

For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $232,000 per year - USD $258,000 per year.

For all US locations, you will be eligible to participate in Uber's bonus program, and may be offered an equity award & other types of comp. All full-time employees are eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan. You will also be eligible for various benefits.